Jennie Franks
{{Short description|British actor, playwright and photographer}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2024}}
{{Use British English|date=August 2015}}
Jennie Franks is an English playwright and filmmaker. She was the first wife of Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson, and wrote some of the lyrics for the Jethro Tull song "Aqualung" (1971).
Career
Franks co-wrote and directed an educational film about the effects of AIDS in rural Colorado titled Soft Smoke, AIDS in the Rural West.Denver Rocky Mountain News. Denver, Colorado: 8 November 1999. p. 7.A{{cite book | title=HIV Plus | publisher=Here Publishing | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jmUEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA12 | access-date=6 September 2020 | page=12}} She wrote and acted in the play Stuck!, about "one woman's courageous struggle to get out of a locked basement bathroom at a coffee house and reclaim control of her stalled life", which debuted in New York in 2008.[http://www.broadwayworld.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=24828 Broadway World] Retrieved on 7 March 2008. She filmed The Ballad of Arthur Muldoon with Terry Jones.{{cite web | title=3rd annual Telluride Playwrighting Festival opens with reading July 1 | website=Telluride Inside... and Out | date=29 June 2009 | url=https://www.tellurideinside.com/2009/06/3rd-annual-telluride-playwrighting-festival-opens-with-reading-july-1.html | access-date=6 September 2020}}
Franks founded SPARKy Productions in 1998, a group dedicated to highlighting social justice issues via creative performance, and acts as its artistic director.{{cite web |title=Mountain Confidential: Jennie Franks |url=https://www.telluridenews.com/the_watch/article_b7834aea-3145-11e5-b3c7-032bec626ea9.html |website=The Watch |date=23 July 2015 |publisher=Telluride Daily Planet |accessdate=6 September 2020}} The organization produced the annual Telluride Playwrights Festival. The film festival culminated in 2016 with Franks' production of The Hispanic Women's Project.{{cite web | title=The Hispanic Women's Project: Inspired, Inspiring, GO! | website=Telluride Inside... and Out | date=27 July 2016 | url=https://www.tellurideinside.com/2016/07/the-hispanic-womens-project-go.html | access-date=6 September 2020}}
Life
Franks was the first wife of Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson, from 1970 to 1974. She wrote some of the lyrics for the Jethro Tull song "Aqualung" (1971). Ian Anderson, the principal songwriter for Jethro Tull, has said, "[she] in fact was responsible for lyrics in the first couple of verses ... I suppose in total probably about half of the lyrics were words or word associations that she had come up with," based on pictures of homeless men Franks had taken as a photography student.[http://remus.rutgers.edu/JethroTull/FAQ.html#Q7 Who is Jennie Anderson, the person credited on the Aqualung album as the author of the title track?] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121022154806/http://remus.rutgers.edu/JethroTull/FAQ.html|date=22 October 2012}}, Jethro Tull FAQ. Retrieved 26 October 2012. "And so she wrote some words and we fashioned that into lyrics. Some of the lines were definitely not lines I would have written. Like, “Snot is running down his nose” was not one of mine [laughs], it was one of hers."{{cite magazine | url=https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/jethro-tulls-ian-anderson-my-life-in-10-songs-666164/aqualung-666169/ | title=Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson: My Life in 10 Songs | magazine=Rolling Stone | date=27 June 2018 }}
Franks later{{when?|date=April 2024}} moved to Los Angeles and married screenwriter and novelist Jeffrey Price. They relocated to Telluride, Colorado in 1993. Franks and her second husband have two daughters.{{cn|date=June 2020}}
References
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Category:Year of birth missing (living people)
Category:English dramatists and playwrights